clockwise from top left: A ladder
display of table runners featuring
3-D pinwheels shows off several
reproduction fabrics; the appliqué
quilt is from the book Mary’s
Favorite '30s: 11 Designs to Honor
Grandma Buddy. This corner nook
is filled with Dutch heritage fabric
by designers Petra Prins and Nel
Kooiman. At the retreat center
above Mary’s Quilt Shop, guests
sleep under antique quilts.recommended that he go to an
auction to find what he was looking
for. Mary accompanied him, and
there she saw a lovely old quilt sell
for $7.50. “I thought to myself,
What am I doing? I can buy other
people’s quilts and not have to work
so hard making my own!Ó Mary says.
So she started snapping up old
and in-progress quilts, repairingor finishing them, and reselling
them— “and I’ve been doing that
for 45 years,” she says. At one point
she had amassed a collection of
400 quilts. Today she’s down to
about 40, ranging in age from 70
to 200 years old.
Many of the quilts Mary
purchased were old and damaged,
and she struggled to match theircolors and textures with existing
fabric. That prompted her to begin
buying antique textiles at auction so
she would always have a stash for
patching and finishing. Eventually,
when companies began coming to
her for fabrics, Mary started
designing them. Her many years of
quilting and collecting had given her
an eye for combining colors and24 | Quilt Sampler FALL/WINTER 2019